Stories:Vygis' Christmas Day Tradition of Leaving For Winter Tour From My House
Author: Charles Dickson (C3PO) For many years in the late 1990's, Vygis maintained a tradition of starting his winter tour from my house on Christmas Day. This is the story of why. The Gilder-Murray House Starting I think in 1990, I inherited rentership of Apartment A in the house at 9909 Baltimore Blvd in College Park and moved out of my parents' house while I finished up college at the University of Maryland. The Gilder-Murray House was an absolutely gigantic tumbledown brick house where some architects used the sprawling first floor as their offices and rented the upstairs out to their children and friends of the family. There were three apartments in the upstairs of the house. Apartment "A" on the east side and Apartment "B" on the west side both consisted of two rooms each plus a bathroom, while Apartment "C" was the attic. The brother of my friend Andy Looney had rented the two and a half rooms on the east side of the 2nd floor long ago as a friend of the Murrays, and had arranged for Andy to take over the apartment when he moved out, and Andy had passed it on to me in a similar fashion. The Oldsmobile . By the mid 1990's the Oldsmobile still ran, but the engine sounded like it was about to fall apart any second (in addition to the car's many other mechanical difficulties). About one of the times that Vygis was crashing at my apartment for a few months, he had chanced upon a book that detailed the renovation of an old Chevy Bel Air, and he and I poored over it for weeks like two teenage girls with an issue of Tiger Beat. The book showed the acquisition of the classic car from a junk yard, its transportation to a shop where it was rebuilt from the frame up. It helps to remember that this to some degree mirrored our ambitions with the Nash (which several years after we had tried to start it was simply hauled away). Reading this book and the summation of our combined auto maintenance experience up to this point gave Vyg the courage to try to do an engine rebuild on the Olds. Practical Auto Restoration In 953 Photographs The book showed "frame off" restoration of a Chevy Bel Air with a complete rebuild of the engine, electrical, and upholstery, in professional car shops with every tool imaginable and a seemingly bottomless budget. Of course, we didn't have the resources for such a project ourselves. But we had the services of a shop in Clarksville which rebuilt carburetors for practically nothing, a shop in Beltsville that I'd found did a pretty good head rebuild, and a network of auto parts shops in the area that we'd gotten pretty familiar with over the years. I had been given an engine hoist outright by our friend John Seylar, and we had free run of the garage at the Gilder-Murray house after timidly cultivating the trust of my landlords over a period of years. So one day, I think in the summer, we pulled the engine out of the Oldsmobile, and stuck it on an engine stand that I also had. Vygis spent months rotating the engine on the stand, pulling off and replacing parts. I helped him with about a quarter of it; the job was fun and he often needed two pairs of hands. The Crankshaft The book had a chapter devoted to the importance of and procedure for rebuilding the crankshaft, with beautiful photos and pages and pages of gossipy instructions, so we made sure to do this for Vygis' rebuild. We puzzled over all the pages showing how to remove and replace the bearings (which oddly enough are just metal plates that survive only because oil is fed over them at high pressure). We carefully removed the crankshaft with the engine upside down on the stand, and Vygis got it turned and we put in all new bearings. We got the head rebuilt, all shiny with new valves and springs. Lacking a ring compressor, we decided to skip getting the block re-bored or putting in new rings. In the end, this turned out to be the stupidest decision possible; once we got the engine back together and got it started by nothing less than a miracle, it sounded no different than when we started! Apparently, the majority of the clicky clacky engine noise that had pissed Vygis off enough to do the rebuild turned out to be in the pistons and rods. Cooking a gear The instructions for how to put the timing gear on the crankshaft said something about heating it up in an oil bath, so on the night we decided to tackle that chore we plugged an electrical hotplate into an outlet in the basement laundry room next to the garage and poured some oil into an old pan and set the crankshaft gear into it. We heated it up and waited for some sign that it was done heating up. We had no idea when that would be or what that looked like, so we just kept going with it. The oil began to boil and smoke, but we had become so accustomed to all kinds of car smells by that point that we didn't quite notice. Eventually we heard steps coming down the stairs to the basement. One of the landlords' sons lived in the attic apartment in the house, and we had so filled the whole house up with the smell of cooking engine oil by that point that he had come down to ask us what was happening and could we please stop it. Constantly worried for the threat of eviction, we hastily shut off the burner! The gear slid easily onto the crankshaft and we buttoned our work up for the night as quickly as we could. The Miracle Of Life Many months had elapsed on the project with constant work, and fall had come and gone. Vygis began to get worried that the project wouldn't be done in time for him to take the car on Winter Tour! We managed to get the engine and transmission reinstalled, and everything hooked up, but for some reason, the car didn't start. I think we spent weeks trying to get it started. Finally, Vygis somehow got John Seylar to come by and help us. On December 23rd he paid us a visit, and in the dark under our greasy and ever-present drop lights, he poked at this and tweaked that and sprayed something into the carburetor, and the car roared to life! I don't think words exist to describe Vygis' elation, the project pulled from complete disaster to success in one moment. On the evening of December 25th he loaded the car up and pulled it out of the driveway, proceeding to drive it up the East Coast from Pennsylvania to New York and Connecticut, all on his old plates with a fake registration sticker. The Tradition Thereafter, Winter Tour always began from the Gilder-Murray house. In 2001, I moved to my own house in Laurel, and after that Vygis always made sure to make a stop by there after Christmas before leaving for the Northeast. I'm not sure if he also included a stop at the Gilder-Murray house, which still stood but was largely abandoned after finally being sold in 2003. The date of his departure at some point changed from the evening of Christmas Day to the day after Christmas. In the beginning he made a big deal of launching Winter Tour from our new house; in later years, it was more of "Oh I just happened to stop by," but I remembered what was going on and appreciated the complement of being kept part of his tradition. Category:Stories Category:People:Charles Dickson Category:Nicknames:C3PO Category:Things:Oldsmobile Omega Category:Places:The Gilder-Murray House Category:People:John Seylar Category:People:Andy Looney Category:Mythologies:Winter Tour